Hard-edged and ruthless ambition

Democrat strategist Pat Caddell tells us to keep the focus on Barack Obama:

So who is Obama? My answer is that his presence in the White House represents the triumph of Chicago politics. The real Obama found his true calling on the streets of Chicago; he might have said the politically correct words from time to time, but for the most part, his career has been characterized by one thing--ambition. And ambition of a hard-edged and ruthless kind; everyone but himself is expendable.

So the real Obama, is, indeed, a lot like Nixon, hiding his scandals behind the facade of his underlings. Each underling, of course, is a chess piece to be sacrificed as the game might require. Obama, like Nixon before him, has a lot of underlings. Others are starting to see the Nixon-Obama parallelism, too: Yesterday, Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith, a journalist who leans left, published a GIF--a tiny animation--showing Obama morphing into Nixon.

As the pollster and strategist for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign Caddell compares the three currently prominent scandals (there are others)

it became clear that I was seeing a replay of the Nixon administration and what I lived through in 1972.

Romney doesn't come off looking very good either, in Caddell's analysis:

Despite a steady string of scoops, many of them from Fox News, in October, Romney pulled back in the third debate, letting Obama skate away from his culpability. Romney’s staffers had told him that he was going to win anyway, so why risk looking mean? And with Romney’s dismissal of the Benghazi issue, the mainstream media felt further justified to dismiss Benghazi, too.

Yes, Romney was regrettably craven, and for that, he not only lost an election he could have won, but earned himself permanent ignominy as someone who put political calculation--incorrect political calculation, at that--ahead of his patriotic duty to raise important concerns.

The administration had managed to keep a lid on three big scandals--wiretapping, IRS, and Benghazi--through Election Day. And so he won re-election, just as Nixon had won, four decades earlier.

Yet as Richard Nixon learned in the wake of his triumphant 1972 re-election--he carried 49 of 50 states that year--victory does not immunize an incumbent from ultimate accountability. Indeed, victory can addle the minds of the victors with hubris and arrogance, making them less able to defend themselves.

We are now seeing an encouraging reality about American politics: No matter how hard you try, no matter how ruthless you might be, you can’t keep a secret. The cover-up might work in the short term, but not for the long term. And that means, as Nixon learned, that even the greatest political victory can turn into ashes--and it can also prove lethal.